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Technology giant IBM introduced software and cloud services designed to help accelerate business processes, including Blueworks Live, a cloud service with the ability to structure and automate ad hoc processes in 90 seconds that businesses currently run over e-mail and attachments. The solution combines and delivers these in one cloud offering starting at $10 per user per month.
With Blueworks Live, employees can start to streamline processes such as new marketing promotional campaigns, employee on-boarding, and sales quote approvals. Business users can also interact with their departmental colleagues and can collaborate through a private and secure company work stream, choosing to follow any updates to roles, processes and more, which are updated in this Facebook-like stream view. Managers and team members can see the status of work in progress via built-in dashboards and reports.
IBM is also adding a new technology to its portfolio of business rules management systems–WebSphere Decision Server. This decision management software, for example, can deliver more dynamic marketing promotions and pricing, better fraud detection and prevention, and more refined risk assessments.
WebSphere Lombardi Edition is another business process management (BPM) offering for building and managing process applications with less time, cost, and risk in a unified platform. With built-in real-time monitoring and analytics, the solution helps businesses gain the visibility to understand process bottlenecks and inefficiencies so they can be streamlined. The company said WebSphere Lombardi Edition is suited for business processes that require a high degree of usage and collaboration. Its shared model architecture also helps ensure collaboration between business and IT departments, the company said.
University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (UCLH), one of the largest NHS (National Health Service) trusts in the U.K. elected to use business process management (BPM) capabilities from WebSphere Lombardi Edition to develop a Patient Tracking System (PTS). UCLH also used capabilities available from Blueworks Live for process discovery sessions of its complex administrative processes.
“A vital part of the Patient Tracking System is the business process management platform that provides real-time tracking, enables parameters to be set and creates the notifications and alerts allowing us to know what stage the patient is in their pathway and how long they have been at that stage,” said James Thomas, IT director of UCLH.
According to IT research firm IDC, public IT cloud services will grow at more than five times the rate of traditional IT products. Worldwide revenue from public IT cloud services exceeded $16 billion in 2009 and is forecast to reach $55.5 billion in 2014, representing a compound annual growth rate of 27.4 percent.
“Seventy-five percent of our customers’ processes today are conducted using e-mail or spreadsheet and document attachments,” said Marie Wieck, IBM’s general manager for application integration middleware. “Blueworks Live is a revolutionary tool for the masses, opening the door to valuable business user involvement and insight into processes not addressed by business process management tools in the past.”